Barnacles
Dear Priscilla Bennett Friends,
Welcome to Friday and another summer weekend. I hope all is going well. Harry and I had lunch with a friend of his, Joe, who had been an officer in the navy. We sat at a pub on the Charles River and watched the boats go by as Joe recounted his navy days traveling on ships through the Panama Canal down to Australia and the Antarctica. My geography has always been lacking, and I have no sense of direction, but after a while I began to wonder if Joe was reporting accurate information when he asked us for the fifth time where we grew up and if we had any children. I decided to focus on his adventures going through the Panama Canal, and he talked about the locks and different levels of salt and fresh water, and when they hit the fresh water, all the barnacles that had latched onto the ship to feed off of it, died and fell off. They couldn’t survive in fresh water. “It was an easy way of getting rid of them,” he laughed.
I laughed too and thought, if only we could change our thinking from one approach to another by dipping our brain in water, so to speak, but changing ingrown patterns that began years ago is much more difficult. Going from the idea of being controlled by the abuser to being free can take many steps, time and thinking about yourself instead of trying to please everyone else. It is a difficult process. In my book, it took Katie a long time to change her thinking. She spent years trying to please Claude—it was never enough—never good enough—and her parents agreed with Claude. After all, it was Katie’s job to be the perfect wife and mother, and she was a failure. Lots of hurdles for Katie to jump over, and the process of freeing herself was slow.
Take good care of yourselves,
PRISCILLA BENNETT XOXO